Amy Gahran's news and musings on how we communicate in the online age.

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Monthly Archives: August 2008

I don't typically get into gaming, but this is something I think I'd enjoy. It's about getting out into the real world and doing stuff. Wonder if there's anything like this happening in Boulder? "SFZero is a Collaborative Production Game. Players build characters by completing tasks for their groups and increasing their Score. The goals of play include meeting new people, exploring the city, and participating in non-consumer leisure activities."

Hmmmm… looks like WP.com has finally caught up with all the people who are using Qik? "The Washington Post has begun streaming live video via mobile phones to the newspaper's site using Comet Technologies, we have learned. The first implementation has come from Ed O'Keefe, reporting live from the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Denver."

MIT researchers: "We have concluded that a 30–50% reduction in fuel consumption is feasible over the next 30 years. In the short-term, this will come as a result of improved gasoline and diesel engines and transmissions, gasoline hybrids, and reductions in vehicle weight and drag. If these improvements are achieved, we estimate a $1,500–$4,500 increase in vehicle costs. Over the longer term, plug-in hybrids and later still, hydrogen fuel cells may enter the fleet in numbers sufficient to have significant an impact on fuel use and emissions." Sounds like a business opportunity to me. US auto industry, are ya listening?

I'll admit it: I've got a bad case of phone-phobia, especially if I'm cold-calling people. Here are some ideas for handling that fear. It's written for salespeople, but it applies elsewhere (event planning, etc.)

The upcoming release of Microsoft Internet Explorer, IE8, includes features that could make online advertisers' jobs more difficult. Includes expanded privacy features that better empower users to delete browsing history and cookies, making them tougher to track. Notably, IE8 includes InPrivate Browsing, which clears the browser cache at the end of a user's session.

This excerpt is from the Aug. 18 episode of one of my favorite vidcasts, Uncle Jay Explains the News. In it, he explains how a recent bit of news-business insanity (15,000 journalists covering each of the national political conventions) might actually be a masterful move by news-org staffing strategists.

(Uncle Jay owns the copyright on this. Posted here with his kind permission.)

Bias, anyone? Is your news org doing this kind of study? If so, is anyone covering it skeptically? "Want to know if advertising works? Or how it works? Or what consumers think? Chances are, you're about to find out as much as or maybe even more than you ever wanted. A slew of media companies, agencies, research firms and even marketers themselves have ramped up efforts to churn out elaborate studies or research results as selling tools. Reasons vary from the obvious need of media to prove themselves, particularly in tough times, to the fact that data-based pitches have gained currency with the public at large."

I don't have a problem with this as long as it's voluntary. This is a strategy other media might want to try to understand how their audiences are changing. "As part of a broad effort to measure viewer activity, NBC gave 41 Olympics enthusiasts a mobile-phone-based monitoring system that would record how they were exposed to the Olympic events, and for how long. Using technology provided by IMMI, a San Mateo, Calif., measurement concern, NBC was able to track a 23-year-old Miami woman, for example, and follow along Aug. 9 as she jumped between the TV, the internet and a mobile device.

Steve Outing is onto something really crucial here. I wish I'd realized this when we started the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project. It really is always easier to join a conversation than start one, especially online. "I’ve started to realize that news organizations would be wise to focus less on creating their own citJ platforms and hoping someone will post something, and more on leveraging the social networks where people already are posting news. My previous post about Twitter touches on this; that micro-blogging service contains (amid all the personal fluff) real news that people are witnessing."

Poynter's Steve Myers: "I created a Twitter account called DNCjournalists (for the Republicans, the account is RNCjournalists, but I haven't set up the source feeds for that yet) that will aggregate updates from other journalists at the conventions. Let's say Tom Brokaw is twittering from Denver. (Is he? Let me know.) All of his updates will go to his followers and, once I add him to the group, also to everyone who follows DNCjournalists."

I think I'll try this out, instead of the Lijit search widget, for awhile. "As everyone knows, you can currently install the Lijit widget on your blog in the traditional, add-the-code-to-your-sidebar kind of way. But now, with this new WordPress plugin, you can keep the current search bar you have on your WordPress blog, but have Lijit power the search results. It’s like magic."

Out of the box, most WordPress themes are terrible when it comes to SEO. So bad in fact it could actually be costing you when it comes to search result placings. Many of the SEO problems associated with WordPress can be fixed. If you have obtained an SEO friendly theme then some of these problems should have been taken care of.

Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page. USeful SEO tool

Why are readers loyal to print, but not so much to electronic versions?

Two things: First, customer loyalty to one brand seems to be a thing of the past. While we have favorites, we no longer stick to one brand just because “it’s always been good in the past.”

Second, Reading patterns have changed. The explosion of information has made us into grazers. We skim for information and pick it up in bits and pieces. We quickly digest it and move on. We graze the same spot many times, but we won’t stay there very long. Those who say “it’s the only paper I read” tend to be older readers who grew up before television, cable, and the Internet began to vie for attention.

This morning I had the privilege of attending some of the morning presentations from this year’s crop of TechStars startup companies in an event called “Investor Day,” held at the Boulder Theater. TechStars is a Boulder, CO-based program that provides seed capital and mentorship for tech startups. SocialThing (which just got bought by AOL) and Brightkite were both graduates of last summer’s TechStars.

The main reason I went was because my good friends Susan Mernit and Lisa Williams were presenting the flagship product, WhozAround, from their new company, People’s Software Company. I’ve been watching them endure the TechStars maelstrom this summer, and they pulled through great despite lots of pressure and stresses.

WhozAround is currently a Facebook application in alpha. It’s the first step in their plan to bypass the current communication chaos that ensues whenever two or more people try to agree on a place & time to meet. As Susan said in her presentation today, “Do all those e-mails, IMs, texts, Facebook notifications, and other messages really make getting together easier?” I can answer that with a resounding “NOT!!!”

Here’s Susan giving the presentation:

And Susan and Lisa taking questions from investors:

(Apologies for the crappy images, my iPhone camera isn’t great for that sort of lighting and distance. I was sitting in the balcony.)

I’ll be heading back to the Boulder Theater in a couple of hours for the Tech Cocktails event there: